What differentiates a GOOD project manager from a GREAT one? Two critical skills: strategic thinking and influence. In this strategic, highly interactive program you will learn and practice tools and techniques for becoming a more strategic project manager. We will start with 8 foundational leadership behaviors guaranteed to build your influence and impact, and then work with practical tools to help you take your strategic influence to the next level.

Foundational Principals:

Mind the MIT:(the Most Important Thing) that contributes to consistent, breakthrough results

Play the Game: don’t game the score. Use data to drive, and not drown, your team

Own the UGLY: eliminate the most common productivity killers

Ditch the Diaper Genie: correct poor performance without drama

Put People Before Projects: quickly build a more competent and confident work force

Rock Your Role: leverage your strengths to make a unique contribution to the organization

Trust the Trenches: know the people closest to your customer or product and what they have to say

Luncheon Keynote: Rob Quillen

Keynote Topic: Why Wait?

Description:

In a nutshell, Why Wait? is about how to change our lives by changing the lives of others. In a talk that follows the theme of his first book, “Why Wait?,” Quillen conveys the importance of making the dreams of others come true. While aboard a commercial flight bound for Newark, New Jersey, the night before the tragic events of 9/11, Rob Quillen had a remarkable and coincidental encounter with a stranger in the seat next to him. That man profoundly changed Quillen’s life and the lives of countless others, forever.

Some call it chance. Some call it luck. Is it coincidence or fate? Do you believe things happen for a reason? The rhetoric of life takes us all down a road paved with questions - options about which direction to take at the crossroads. Whether its fate or luck, when life presents you with an opportunity, what are YOU going to do with it? Rob will share with you how a random meeting with a perfect stranger changed his life and how it will change yours.

The 3 Learning Objectives:

Challenge yourself to help other people

Make dreams come true

Listen to your calling

Afternoon Keynote: Brian Brio

Keynote Topic: BREAK THROUGH!

Description:

Every PMI Heartland event is aimed at helping members BREAKTHROUGH! In a world of astonishingly accelerating technology and change it is crucial to challenge the status quo and find new and better ways to manage projects, build synergy, and BREAKTHROUGH to new levels of success and performance. In this closing keynote Brian Biro will guide every participant to get off the sidelines and into the game as they learn and apply the most powerful breakthrough beliefs that create extraordinary results. Everyone will emerge with these BREAKTHROUGH takeaways:

Understanding and utilizing the immense impact of a "compelling why"

Developing a definition of success that leads to constant improvement rather than fear of failure

The immense importance of focusing on what you want rather than what you don't want

Buckle up for a keynote that will be more energized, participative, fun, and meaningful than you've ever attended. Get ready to BREAKTHROUGH!

Pricing:

Early Bird: Today through September 19th 2018:

PMI Heartland Member $250 & 7.5 PDUs

Non-member $300

September 20, 2018 through October 12, 2018

PMI Heartland Member $300 & 7.5 PDUs

Non-member $350

October 15, 2017 - Walk-ins Welcome

PMI Heartland Member $375 & 7.5 PDUs

Non-member $395

Morning Break-Out Presentation Options

Morning Breakout Sessions Options (Choose one)

1.5 PDUs

All breakout sessions are located on the third floor

Strategic & Business Management PDUs

Leadership PDUs

Technical PDUs

Karin Hurt

Topic: Strategic Story Telling for Project Managers

Brian Brio

Topic: Breakthrough Leadership

Matt Kirilov

Topic: Is SAFe a Safe Bet for Your Organization?

Van Deeb

Topic: Goal Setting Creating a Flight Path for Success

David Dye

Topic: Leading the ART of the Tough Conversation

Morning Breakout Descriptions:

Karen Hurt: Strategic Story Telling for Project Managers

As a project manager, you know that communication requires more than readouts and PowerPoint decks. The real art of communication comes down to how you can influence key stakeholders and engage your project team.

In this session, you will work with the powerful S.T.O.R.I.E.S. technique for communicating with impact. You will use strategic storytelling to hone communication skills, reinforce key messages, and enhance trust and transparency. Participants are given quick guidelines for developing their strategic stories, and then have an opportunity to work on them and practice with a group.

Highlights include:

One technique that connects you to your audience

Help your audience believe in themselves

How find the stories that bring your message alive

Brian Brio: Breakthrough Leadership

Breakthroughs are not just possible - they're plannable!

Ultimately, no matter what industry you’re involved in, you are in the BREAKTHROUGH business!

Every day you seek to breakthrough with customers to generate loyalty, satisfaction, and relationship. The key to lasting success in business is breaking through with your own team members so they eagerly embrace personal responsibility, committed purpose, and leadership. They must see themselves as breakthrough leaders! And especially in times of challenge, they must focus persistently on what they CAN do rather than wasting time and energy on the things they don’t control.

This one-of-a-kind presentation ignites the energy and true leadership potential in every participant.

Breakthrough Leadership is full spectrum leadership that teaches every participant how to shape the future, energize the team, build effective relationships, drive results, and model personal excellence, integrity, and accountability. In this vibrant, engaging presentation, you’ll gain new appreciation for your impact on others and how you can make a genuine difference!

The session creates a fresh, new, and exciting vision of leadership that includes these three dynamic takeaways:

Igniting “E” Power in your team—the #1 key to igniting others and self

How to shape the future by controlling the controllable called your vision

The Scaled Agile Framework (abbreviated as SAFe), is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices. SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team.

SAFe promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams. It was developed by and for practitioners, by leveraging three primary bodies of knowledge: agile software development, lean product development, and systems thinking.

The primary reference for the scaled agile framework was originally the development of a big picture view of how work flowed from product management (or other stakeholders), through governance, program, and development teams, out to customers. With the collaboration of others in the agile community, this was progressively refined and then first formally described in a 2007 book. The framework continues to be developed and shared publicly; with an academy and an accreditation scheme supporting those who seek to implement, support, or train others in the adoption of SAFe.

Identify if an organization is an early, late, or none adopter of the Agile philosophy and its frameworks and answer the question if one is ready to scale.

Find out why team emotional safety is not just a buzzword, but a prerequisite for high performance.

Examine SAFe and think about which scaling framework is right for you.

Van Deeb: Goal Setting Creating a Flight Path for Success

The well-known statement, if you fail to plan you are really planning to fail, is the core message to the audience in this presentation. Did you know over 97% of people in business do not have a written plan for their goals? It is true that people spend more time planning their child’s wedding or summer vacation than they do on their own career. This presentation will help you create goals for yourself at a pace that is customized to fit you and not a one size fits all. You will learn how to set goals that are attainable, hold yourself accountable and increase your personal productivity. Van will use his experiences of setting written goals to help you accomplish whatever your objectives are. Van calls this his FUNdamental course of how to increase market share by just making some simple adjustments in your daily schedule.

David Dye: Leading the ART of the Tough Conversation

Do you have a tough conversation you need to have, but are avoiding at all costs? Have you ever regretted not having the tough conversation, as you watched someone you truly care about repeat a pattern that severely impacted your business? Is your project team speaking with the candor they need to address problems and make the best decisions?

Mastering the art of the tough conversation is the key to moving forward and on past difficult moments. David shares the Winning Well model of tough conversations during this invigorating workshop program.

Highlights include:

Understanding the conversation you must have with yourself

Tools to solve 90% of your tough conversations before they happen

Why some traditional management feedback methods do more harm than good

How to ‘Ditch the Diaper Genie’ and have the conversations you need to have

Strategic leadership requires you to take responsibility for mistakes, recognize your vulnerabilities as a team and make the strategic changes that will take your team’s performance to the next level. In this highly interactive session we will work with the Own the U.G.L.Y. model to strategically examine opportunities and vulnerabilities to take your projects to the next level. Highlights include:

Ways to identify unexplored opportunities that are hiding in plain sight.

How to facilitate healthy discussions about what holds back your team

Participants will identify and explore specific opportunities that will help their teams to transform.

Brian Brio: Building People!

The ultimate secrets to building a culture of optimism!

How do you build trust, momentum, energy, and passion into every member of your team, whether you’re the long-time leader or the rawest rookie? And when the workday is done, how do you bring that same enthusiasm to your loved ones? Most importantly, how do you build these qualities within yourself?

In Building People! Brian Biro, America’s Breakthrough Coach guides you to exciting and fresh new approaches in using recognition, acknowledgement, and appreciation to build others.

Through wonderful stories and engaging activities, you’ll discover the most crucial keys to building trust and to helping everyone around you feel important and significant. You’ll learn the most surprising secret to elevate engagement and build leaders.

Along the way, you will never experience a presentation with greater energy than Building People! By the conclusion of the presentation you will be fired up to lift and ignite all those around you, whether your teammates and colleagues in your professional life or your loved ones at home.

Three Powerful Takeaways from Building People:

The most important key to building trust and loyalty

The enormous impact of valuing differences

An unforgettable formula for delivering uplifting recognition and appreciation

In this session, we will look at the common rituals that Agile teams participate in, and learn how to increase productivity, throughput, and accountability in these rituals. We will also run a couple of exercises on quick backlog prioritization techniques, formulating experiments, and release planning.

You will learn:

How to gamify your meetings and get more throughput out of them

Quick prioritization techniques for refining the backlog with product owners and stakeholders

Running continuous experiments, optimizing demos and retros

Ann Gillespee: Listening for Understanding

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” – Robert McCloskey

Listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving, but how often do you consciously practice this skill? As Stephen Covey stated, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

This means to learn to actively listen to your customers, clients, and team members.

This program will help you learn to manage and improve your listening skills by:

Evaluating your listening habits

Minimizing distractions

Practicing key active listening techniques

David Dye: Leading Through Times of Ambuguity and Change with Improve Comedy

There isn’t just more change - the rate of change is accelerating. Your success requires you to lead your project team through constant change, ambiguity, and shifting environments. The good news is that you and your colleagues are more innovative and adaptable than you know. In this lab you’ll experience the same tools used by Improv Comics to cultivate their creativity and in-the-moment-humor. David shares these same tools with executive teams, boards of directors, and leaders around the world. You’ll laugh, have fun, and walk away with tools you can use to lead through times of ambiguity and change as well as release the innovation in your project team. Highlights include:

Sponsor Tables Open All Day – Visit every sponsor; receive a stamp in your passport. All attendees must receive stamps from all sponsors in order to be eligible for the prize drawing. During the last break, (4:15 PM) stop by the table sponsored by TBDshow your complete/stamped passport to receive an entry into the prize drawing.

PMI Heartland offers you a PMP/CAPM certification training course that is better and more cost-effective than PMP training boot camps - and this fall is the first class since the PMBOK version change in March 2018.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Online registration for monthly luncheon events will now remain open and not close so you can now register day of the event and at the event. The registration price increases to $25 after 5:00 pm CT on the day before the luncheon event.

Join us for the August Monthly Luncheon on August 15th at Scott Conference Center

We are pleased to present…..

How Team Roles Drive Success by

ANN GILLASPIE MA PHR

Ann is a former Sr. Learning and Development Consultant. She is an experienced coach, facilitator and trainer and has provided many seminars in the community on human resource issues and professional and management development. She earned her Masters of Art in Education from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and her Bachelor of Science in Education from the University of Nebraska -Lincoln. Ann devotes her energy to training and teaching. As a former high school communications teacher, Ann knows the importance of education and training to sustain personal excellence.

Program Overview:

“Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”

– Patrick Lencioni

When a team is performing at its best, you'll usually find that each team member has clear responsibilities. Just as importantly, you'll see that every role needed to achieve the team's goal is being performed fully and well. But often, despite clear roles and responsibilities, a team will fall short of its full potential.